Live Review: Foals - Bonus Arena, Hull 25/04/2022
Foals return as a three-piece to bring their phenomenal live show and career spanning set to Hull’s Bonus Arena.
Having not played in the city for over a decade, Foals finally returned to Hull to play Bonus Arena, one of the city’s newest venues. A lot has changed since I last saw Foals live in summer 2019 and after a postponed world tour, the band are back as a three-piece on the cusp of releasing their 7th album. The tour was originally set out to support ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1 & Part 2’, so it goes without saying that these dates have been highly anticipated for the best part of 2 years.
Support came from Goat Girl, who announced they had “never played in Hull before” as the crowd was building. Fresh from their tour supporting Sam Fender, Goat Girl have picked up a good run of dates with Foals and head out with Metronomy next month too. Their set was formed mostly of songs from their 2021 release ‘On All Fours’, which proved a distinct progression in their experimental sound and live performance.
It's hard for a new venue to show much character, the standing section of Bonus Arena is a vast space, and the seating feels a mile from the stage, but it’s without a doubt that this venue has brought a lot of huge acts to Hull. Fans were buzzing as Foals took to the stage, opening with ‘Wake Me Up’, the first release of their new album ‘Life Is Yours’. The energy and stage presence was evident early on as the band ran through songs like ‘Mountain at My Gates’, ‘The Runner’, ‘Olympic Airways’ and new single ‘Looking High’. Each song was accompanied by strobe lights, amazing visuals and a huge video backdrop, cementing the fact Foals are a proper arena band and continue as one of the best British live acts out there.
Before playing ‘My Number’ lead singer Yannis Philippakis made a nod to one of Hull’s nightclubs, “this is for anyone who’s ever been to Spiders”, which was perhaps a prompt from guitarist Jimmy Smith, who spent his university years in Hull. After the gig Jimmy wrote on his Instagram stories how it makes him happy to see Hull doing well, “it makes me so proud, what a great city”, well, he isn’t wrong!
Amongst fan favourites ‘In Degrees’, ‘Spanish Sahara’ and ‘Inhaler’ we we’re able to get more of a teaser of what might be to come with the new album ‘Life Is Yours’. ‘2am’, ‘Looking High’, and possible new single ‘2001’ were slotted into the set seamlessly and proved to be well received by the crowd. As a band with such a back catalogue, it’s simply impossible to play everything, but the setlist was varied, diving into each album fairly equally.
The Oxford based band came back out for an encore consisting of ‘Black Bull’, ‘What Went Down’ and debut album track ‘Two Steps, Twice’; a song that I’m unsure could ever be replaced as the final song. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Foals live, their performance is so finely tuned it’s hard to say no to the opportunity of seeing them live. The light set up and visuals on this tour are the best I’ve seen from Foals, as we await the release of ‘Life Is Yours’ it’s easy to say that Foals are a band who just get bigger and better with every album, don’t sleep on the opportunity to see them live.
Words and Photography by Abbie Jennings
